9 research outputs found
The Metabolism and Growth of Web Forums
We view web forums as virtual living organisms feeding on user's attention
and investigate how these organisms grow at the expense of collective
attention. We find that the "body mass" () and "energy consumption" ()
of the studied forums exhibits the allometric growth property, i.e., . This implies that within a forum, the network transporting
attention flow between threads has a structure invariant of time, despite of
the continuously changing of the nodes (threads) and edges (clickstreams). The
observed time-invariant topology allows us to explain the dynamics of networks
by the behavior of threads. In particular, we describe the clickstream
dissipation on threads using the function , in which
is the clickstreams to node and is the clickstream dissipated
from . It turns out that , an indicator for dissipation efficiency,
is negatively correlated with and sets the lower boundary
for . Our findings have practical consequences. For example,
can be used as a measure of the "stickiness" of forums, because it quantifies
the stable ability of forums to convert into , i.e., to remain users
"lock-in" the forum. Meanwhile, the correlation between and
provides a convenient method to evaluate the `stickiness" of forums. Finally,
we discuss an optimized "body mass" of forums at around that minimizes
and maximizes .Comment: 6 figure
The Role of Diverse Strategies in Sustainable Knowledge Production
Online communities are becoming increasingly important as platforms for
large-scale human cooperation. These communities allow users seeking and
sharing professional skills to solve problems collaboratively. To investigate
how users cooperate to complete a large number of knowledge-producing tasks, we
analyze StackExchange, one of the largest question and answer systems in the
world. We construct attention networks to model the growth of 110 communities
in the StackExchange system and quantify individual answering strategies using
the linking dynamics of attention networks. We identify two types of users
taking different strategies. One strategy (type A) aims at performing
maintenance by doing simple tasks, while the other strategy (type B) aims
investing time in doing challenging tasks. We find that the number of type A
needs to be twice as big as type B users for a sustainable growth of
communities.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure
The role of diverse strategies in the sustainability of online communities
Online communities are becoming increasingly important as platforms for large-scale human cooperation. These communities allow users seeking and sharing professional skills to solve problems collaboratively. To investigate how users cooperate to complete a large number of knowledge-producing tasks, we analyze Stack Exchange, one of the largest question and answer systems in the world. We construct attention networks to model the growth of 110 communities in the Stack Exchange system and quantify individual answering strategies using the linking dynamics on attention networks. We identify two answering strategies. Strategy A aims at performing maintenance by doing simple tasks, whereas strategy B aims at investing time in doing challenging tasks. Both strategies are important: empirical evidence shows that strategy A decreases the median waiting time for answers and strategy B increases the acceptance rate of answers. In investigating the strategic persistence of users, we find that users tends to stick on the same strategy over time in a community, but switch from one strategy to the other across communities. This finding reveals the different sets of knowledge and skills between users. A balance between the population of users taking A and B strategies that approximates 2:1, is found to be optimal to the sustainable growth of communities
The Role of Diverse Strategies in Sustainable Knowledge Production
abstract: Online communities are becoming increasingly important as platforms for large-scale human cooperation. These communities allow users seeking and sharing professional skills to solve problems collaboratively. To investigate how users cooperate to complete a large number of knowledge-producing tasks, we analyze Stack Exchange, one of the largest question and answer systems in the world. We construct attention networks to model the growth of 110 communities in the Stack Exchange system and quantify individual answering strategies using the linking dynamics on attention networks. We identify two answering strategies. Strategy A aims at performing maintenance by doing simple tasks, whereas strategy B aims at investing time in doing challenging tasks. Both strategies are important: empirical evidence shows that strategy A decreases the median waiting time for answers and strategy B increases the acceptance rate of answers. In investigating the strategic persistence of users, we find that users tends to stick on the same strategy over time in a community, but switch from one strategy to the other across communities. This finding reveals the different sets of knowledge and skills between users. A balance between the population of users taking A and B strategies that approximates 2:1, is found to be optimal to the sustainable growth of communities.The article is published at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.014915
The Collective Direction of Attention Diffusion
abstract: We find that the flow of attention on the Web forms a directed, tree-like structure implying the time-sensitive browsing behavior of users. Using the data of a news sharing website, we construct clickstream networks in which nodes are news stories and edges represent the consecutive clicks between two stories. To identify the flow direction of clickstreams, we define the “flow distance” of nodes (L[subscript i]), which measures the average number of steps a random walker takes to reach the ith node. It is observed that L[subscript i] is related with the clicks (C[subscript i]) to news stories and the age (T[subscript i]) of stories. Putting these three variables together help us understand the rise and decay of news stories from a network perspective. We also find that the studied clickstream networks preserve a stable structure over time, leading to the scaling between users and clicks. The universal scaling behavior is confirmed by the 1,000 Web forums. We suggest that the tree-like, stable structure of clickstream networks reveals the time-sensitive preference of users in online browsing. To test our assumption, we discuss three models on individual browsing behavior, and compare the simulation results with empirical data.The final version of this article, as published in Scientific Reports, can be viewed online at: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep3405